The Meatspace Times

In Oak Square this morning, the morning of the longest day unless that was actually yesterday, but anyway pretty close. I don’t mind being awakened by early light these summer days. It makes the dawn mystery different, the night lives of the fairies truncated a little, perhaps, or perhaps they find ways to prolong their existence, wearing the equivalent of raincoats against the light.

In any case, although I know perfectly well  what’s over the rise of Washington street as it humps up past the old closed Presentation church, I imagine it might be like the cover of an old book of fairy stories I had as a kid, where a boy and a girl peer around an oak tree, their normal schoolyard behind them, a world of castles and flying horses ahead of them.

What if past Presentation’s stone tower was a world of wizards, immortal Nonantum sachems still wishing to question the English talker Eliot about this god of his and the whole idea of predestination which has stuck in their aboriginal craws? And elk, too, let’s not leave out elk.

And of course Puck, on this midsummer day, Puck is out there still upsetting milk pails like anybody still thinks that’s funny after five hundred years. Ah, Puck, where have you gone? Hitched a ride on the Turnpike, opened a head shop out in Lee. Sometimes, on Midsummer Night, he drunk dials Theseus and asks if he has Prince Albert in the can.